Brothers on the Bashkaus

Guarding the canyon like a sentry, a rapid called Unpopulated marks the beginning of the lower gorge. It’s an apt name. Not many people in their right mind would pass here. A large waterfall cascades into the river on the left, while two large boulders force the river into a narrow slot on the right barely wider than our catarafts. Then the river just disappears. I’ve never seen a sharper horizon line. The drop is so abrupt and long that we can’t even see the mist rising from below.

A trick to running rapids on a raft is to stand up to get a better view of what lurks downstream. On conventional oar and paddle rafts, you can stand on the raft’s floor, or even tubes or frame, to see beyond the horizon line and farther downstream. In a kayak, that advantage disappears, but increased maneuverability and the ability to Eskimo roll make up for it. Kneeling on a floorless cataraft affords a slightly better vantage than sitting in a kayak, but not much.

The horizon line is book-ended by steep canyon walls. It feels like the walls are closing in on us, blocking all but a sliver of the sky. Downstream, the gorge walls give way to steep scree slopes falling down the mountainsides. Between these are avalanche paths that funnel cracked snowfields from high above down to the canyon floor. The slopes are bare of everything save for Siberian grass still clinging to their snow-ravaged flanks.

We laid over to give Vladimir’s ploht and the other cataraft group time to get through this entrance rapid. But the cataraft team is still camped at the only available site at the top of the rapid. So after scouting long and carefully, and then lunch—another hearty bowl of hot fish water and pork fat—we decide to push downward first and leapfrog them. The rapid itself looks easier than the Class V we negotiated earlier, but it’s more forbidding, flanked by the towering walls of the lower canyon. It’s also far more consequential. A flip here doesn’t ultimately deliver the swimmers into a nice quiet eddy. The current careens relentlessly toward the next horizon line and potentially lethal drop below.

We scout it for about an hour. By choice, Ramitch goes first without even playing the fingers game. Perhaps he remembers the rapid from his earlier trip, or otherwise knows something we don’t and can show us. He hits the slot and then jogs left, paralleling a diagonal line of boulders placed in a row like bowling pins. The boulders hide sieves, places where the water passes through but not less permeable items such as, say, bodies. Sieves are among the deadliest obstacles to be encountered on a river. I’ve had paddling acquaintances killed by them. Float into one and you’re nothing more than a noodle plastered onto a colander. That’s why they call them “strainers.” Still, these look easy enough to miss if you get through the slot correctly. Ramitch’s boat does just that, and he pulls over to wait below the rapid.

Second boat again, we peel out of the eddy and dig hard for the slot, paddling harder than we have all trip. Once there, we spin at the brink to straighten out so we’ll fit through. Then we plunge down the giant, narrow ramp into the lower canyon.

If linebackers welcome rookies into the National Football League with a voracious hit, this is the Bashkaus’s welcome mat. The hole at the bottom of the slot buries us, our homemade frame the only thing keeping our raft from buckling. Where the earlier Class V had us paddling straight forward to maintain momentum, here, we can not. Once through the hole, we employ a variety of strokes to zigzag our way past the maze of boulders. Faster than I can call for it, Edge throws in a draw stroke at the perfect time to bring our bow around to the right and around a rock while Ben simultaneously executes a sweep stroke, fanning his paddle blade in a wide C shape across the surface to turn the boat from the opposite corner. Without relying on my commands, everyone intrinsically knows immediately what to do and does it. We’re a great team. In a series of tight, well-executed moves, we waterbug our way down and complete the run without mishap.

“Nice line, guys,” Edge says in the calmer water below, as we high-five our accomplishment.

“Yeah, nice Lugbill you threw in there,” I add, referring to Olympic slalom paddler Jon Lugbill, known for contorting his body into a pretzel when making a difficult stroke. We all made the right moves in the right instant, in perfect coordination, and we know it. Fear activates us, together. At this moment, our commitment to stay with Team Konkas feels right. We breathe hard and satisfied.

Our commendations are short lived, however. Little do we know, we’re fast approaching our first taste of Portage Hell.

Almost as soon as we put back on, the next horizon line, marking the entrance to Barricade Rapid, confronts us. We did not anticipate it. We’re barely through Unpopulated Rapid when more mist rises from a cataract below. We eddy out above it on the right and see Ramitch. Soon, Sergei joins us. It’s all we would do today.

“Camp place, carry things,” says Ramitch.

We unpack and carry our gear a half mile downstream to camp. Barricade’s thunderous roar drowns out our curses from stumbling over the loose boulders.

It’s not much of a camp, if it can be called that at all. It’s our tightest quarters yet. About thirty feet long and five feet wide, there’s barely two feet of width apiece for fourteen sleeping bodies. Worse, it’s interspersed with uneven rocks. Worse still, we’re sharing it with the six members of the first ploht team we met, the ones hiking out at the next major drainage. Even though they’re taking the easy way out—at least as far as adrenaline goes—by hiking over to the Chulishman, they still have to get through several more Class Vs, including Barricade, to reach salvation. Vladimir’s group is nowhere to be seen. With him at the helm, they must have pushed through quickly and kept going.

Ramitch shows me a boulder ten feet away from my ground pad that tumbled down when he was camped here three years ago. A trail of snapped trees, like broken toothpicks, leads to its former home in the cliffs. Welcome to the lower gorge. If the starvation or rapids don’t get you, the rockfall might.

I try to relax by settling into Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a not-so-easy-to-follow tale about four brothers who become involved in the murder of their father. It’s easier to read, at least, than the complicated waters of the Bashkaus. As much as I appreciate Dostoyevsky’s work, it does little to settle my nerves. Sentences flow into each other like scattered, random currents, and run on like a piece of driftwood with nowhere else to go. Nothing like a little easy-to-digest Russian literature to take your mind off a Class V drop you hear all night and have to run the next day.